Television has made dictatorship impossible, but democracy unbearable.

On the loftiest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own rump.

Politics is the art of the possible.

Why has the government been instituted at all? Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice without constraint.

Whether for good or evil, it is sadly inevitable that all political leadership requires the artifices of theatrical illusion. In the politics of a democracy, the shortest distance between two points is often a crooked line.

I am invariably of the politics of the people at whose table I sit, or beneath whose roof I sleep.

It is impossible to tell which of the two dispositions we find in men is more harmful in a republic, that which seeks to maintain an established position or that which has none but seeks to acquire it.

The affairs of the world are no more than so much trickery, and a man who toils for money or honor or whatever else in deference to the wishes of others, rather than because his own desire or needs lead him to do so, will always be a fool.

There is nothing more tyrannical than a strong popular feeling among a democratic people.

What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.

Every communist must grasp the truth: “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Written laws are like spiderwebs: they will catch, it is true, the weak and poor but would be torn in pieces by the rich and powerful.

You have all the characteristics of a popular politician: a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.